41–50 of 126 posts
Someone is an optimist! I'd estimate those significantly higher, and even worse if you are in a field that has to do any sort of SOC/HIPAA/GDPR audit
Insightful. Agree with this take. Unfortunately, maintainability is simply bucketed as a "non-functional" requirement. Maintainability (and similar NFRs) should actually be considered what preserves and enables the delivery of future functional requirements -- in contrast to framing non-functional requirements as simply "how" the software must do what it does vs. the "what"/functional requirements that "actually matt…
I've found the first, and most important, step for any team or organisation to eliminate concerns with NFRs, "tech debt", and whatever else it may be called, is to stop giving it a name. I'm being completely serious. By giving it some kind of distinct name, you are giving license to it being ring-fenced and de-prioritised by someone who doesn't (but, arguably, probably should) know better. Quality matters. It hits yo…
Same with code reviews. I wonder if AI could make code reviews more presentable. for example, with human code reviews, developers learn quickly not to visually change code like reflowing code or comments, changing indent (where the tools can't suppress it), moving functions around or removing lines or other spurious changes. And don't refactor code needlessly. also, could break reviews up into two reviews - functiona…
That makes reviews a lot easier. The review starts from "nothing should be changing" and then reviewers can pattern match on that.
Otherwise, the reviewer is re-evaluating every line of code to make sure nothing has changed. That's really hard to do properly.
The version control systems I've worked with have allowed queues of changes, each one reviewed independently. As I'm developing, if I need a refactor, I go up a commit, refactor, send out for review, rebase my in progress work and continue.
I send out a continual stream of "CLEANUP:" "REFACTOR_ONLY:", and similar changes with the final change being a lot smaller than a big monster of a change.
Your reviewers will appreciate the effort.
Plays the metric game (if you're working in that type of org) without being evil too.
That's the theory anyway.
Yeah, but to be honest, I sometimes just tell Claude to cleanup / refactor stuff; it finds a lot of things, discusses it with me and I approve the plan, and it churns away my tokens for some time. I do this once in a while, and I've been doing this for over 6 months and I don't feel like my development has significantly slowed down. Yeah my token usage is more for sure, but my codebase also is, so I'm not worried abo…
An agent can reduce typing while increasing the number of things nobody really owns later: rationale, invariants, tradeoffs, half-meaningful tests, files that changed because they were nearby, etc. The PR can pass and still leave the team with more intent to rediscover.
The useful agent workflows I keep coming back to are less about "write more code" and more about making every change come with a maintenance handle: what invariant changed, what should fail if this is wrong, what files should not have changed, what rollback looks like. It feels slower in the moment, but it gives future-you something to grab onto.
When an LLM provides you with an overconfident piece of writing with no sources to back it up, what do you do?
This could have been a good piece of writing if the author chose not to be so smugly overconfident in their belief and show real evidence to support their claim. Mentioning the front page of HN as your source is glib and immediately made me doubt the conclusions. I was interested to see what work the author put into researching this but apparently they didn’t do any work at all. When an LLM provides you with an overc…
You draw made up lines on made up plots and call it evidence, obviously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will probably be how things will work in future: devs will shift to specifying features which will be validate through tests. The AI will then be middle layer that will iterate until tests pass. Layer 1: Specs (Humans) Layer 2: Code (AI mostly) Layer 3: Tests (AI + human checks).
What a boring fucking future.